


Lost Laughter in the Breeze

by nahul



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Atsumu is a great brother, Autumn, Childhood Memories, Fluff, Gen, Osamu is a great brother
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 18:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21275372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nahul/pseuds/nahul
Summary: There's always going to be lapses in their lives, times when they're nothing more than just two brothers navigating through life. Revisiting memories where the ghosts of happiness reign.





	Lost Laughter in the Breeze

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea what inspired this but happy atsumu character sheets release day guys.

Crisp leaves paint the pavement, dousing it in golden brown colourings. Autumnal breezes rush through his collarbone, not yet protected by the hefty weight of a scarf. Not yet, when the texture of the sun can still be felt on the walls his arms touch as he walks down the road, tracing an uneven line into the bricks with the tips of his fingers.

He’s lagging behind his brother, kicking up lonesome crimson leaves that litter the path and watching his brother speed down the path towards the park. Laughter caught on the wind breezes past him as they finally walk through the park gates, playground swings and roundabouts long forgotten. His brother darts forward, never staying still for a second, getting caught up in an energy high as he runs around the park. Clambours up the slide and kicks his legs to an imaginary beat on the swings.

Childish chimes of playground rhymes catch a corner in the back of his mind, and momentarily he is dazed between the here and now and the past. Days long ago, too far gone to turn back time now, tug at his hands; point eagerly to distant lands.

“‘Samu!” he calls out, “Come here!” 

And begrudgingly, he obliges, picking up his feet and sauntering after the blond who’s currently seated on the roundabout. Innocuous as ever.

“What, d’ya want me to push you or something? You’re way too heavy for that-”

“Hey! You weigh more than me!” Atsumu pouts, slouches in his seat and tilts his head back.

Autumn days stretch shorter than summer days, longer than winter days. Nightfall tastes like hot cocoa and marshmallows on his tongue, and the stars begin to peak out from their candyfloss dyed blankets. Pumpkin oranges dip into warm mulberry purples, and Osamu wonders what happened to the time.

“Well, d’ya want me to push the roundabout? It’s kind of hard to try to do that when your feet are diggin’ into the ground, y’know?” Osamu pointedly kicks at his brother’s foot, sending Atsumu’s entire body off balance slightly.

His face nearly flies into the metal bar of the roundabout, and Osamu hides his mocking snort between a seasonal cough and rubs his ungloved hands against each other in some feigned attempt at coaxing warmth into his fingers. Grasping the bar with a lazy hand, Atsumu glares up at his twin. Mouth opening, Osamu prepares himself for some sort of barrage of half-hearted insults, but they never come.

Instead, he just tucks his feet under his knees, one hand coming to rest atop of his knees, chin resting upon his arm. 

“Go on then,” Atsumu prompts, and Osamu leans forward to slowly push the roundabout.

They are silent for a while. Moments pass them by, each stretching out and shortening simultaneously. Osamu’s footsteps are a steady beat, tapping against the ground, tempo quickening ever so slightly as he continues. Words seem to fall from his mind as he goes, not really understanding why he’s running until he is. Round and round and round, until the dizziness takes over and he feels like he’s seven all over again.

Seven years old, exhausting all his energy away in this very playground. Not caring for the nip of the chilly breeze that falls down his neck, tangles his hair in knots as he comes to a halt. Drunk on the highs of laughter and playground air that doesn’t smell as kind in your eighteenth autumn. Breathing slightly unsteady, he rests his hands on his knees and waits a second to catch his breath. Steals a glance at his brother while he’s at it. Atsumu is curled up into a ball, staring at nothing in particular, and he seems to have dropped that air of well-placed confidence he usually carries about himself. There’s a dullness to his eyes that shouldn’t exist; a monotony that extracts the vibrance from the autumnal setting.

It looks as though he hasn’t even noticed that Osamu’s stopped. Shaking his head, his vision stops spinning as violently and the world almost comes to a standstill. His brother is still sat, as expected almost. Osamu waves a hand in front of his face, a last-ditch attempt to grasp his attention from whatever hole he’s dug inside his mind.

“What?” Atsumu’s voice sounds snappy, threatened, like a barking dog without any bite. Still, Osamu flinches back.

“You really wanted to come all the way out here just to… play on a roundab-”

“‘Samu, look,” Atsumu interrupts, voice serious and Osamu wonders whether he’s fallen in some sort of trap as he glances in the direction his brother points-

And there’s a crown of velvet trimmed with yellow and auburn leaves dumped on his head. Clairet foliage interweaving with russet and burnt amber, creased and crispy when his hand reaches up to tug them out his hair. All Osamu can do is sputter in an unsurprised way, the sort that tells Atsumu that he knew he’d do that, even as he cards his fingers through his hair and tells himself that he won’t look too strange with something akin to a bird’s nest resting in his hair on the walk back home.

“‘Tsumu!” Osamu gasps, turning to see the most infuriating grin spread across his twin’s cheeks. 

An ear-to-ear grin that causes his eyes to crease at the corner in some ecstatic, guiltless state of mirth. Pulling out a clump of crispy leaves that crunch into nothingness from his hair, he aims them at Atsumu’s face. And his laughter is cut short with a cluster of leaves shoved down his throat, eyes adopting that glint of disgust as he sputters and spits and hacks away, slamming his palm against his chest. 

“‘Samu!” he pouts, “They could’ve  _ killed  _ me!”

“And? My hair was looking brilliant before you converted it into a bird’s nest?”

Atsumu huffs, bending down to gather another cluster of twigs and leaves crawling with woodlice into his arms before he straightens his posture once more. There’s a frown etched into his face, wrinkling his forehead and turning up eyebrows up, and there’s a mischievous glint hiding behind the facade of hurt hiding in his eyes.

“That is incomparable to  _ poisoning  _ your twin brother with dirty leaves, ‘Samu!”

And with the exclamation, he darts forward, pushing an abundance of ambers, oranges and reds onto Osamu’s hair once more, somewhat officially declaring war.

“Hmm? But if the leaves were like, poisonous, couldn’t the poison have soaked into my head through osmosis or something?”

Osamu peels damp, moist leaves that somehow imprinted themselves onto his skin, pasting them onto Atsumu’s forehead in retaliation. They dissolve into a chaotic mess of leaves being thrown back and forth, golden leaves falling in the air between sprays of laughable insults and squeals of indignance. As though they are seven once more, instead of eighteen year old boys.

And at some point, when the dark grey skies have taken over the sun’s dominant golden glow of the sky, they pause. Drop into the playground swings and dangle their feet half heartedly. 

“Let’s race; whoever gets the highest first wins,” Atsumu blurts out, kicking against the softened tarmac ground beneath him, and Osamu just follows his lead.

And halfway through their chaotic, haphazard race, Atsumu just flings himself off the swings, the way he did when they were children and he’d always fall into gravel. Scuff his knees and scar his arms and insist that, “No, ‘Samu, I’m  _ not  _ crying!”; when he’d furiously push away stray tears from his eyes whilst Osamu dabbed antiseptic wipes on his cuts. When Osamu would place fox patterned band-aids over clean cuts and tell Atsumu to “Stop whining about how much it stings if you don’t want mum to find out.”

Except this time, he doesn’t fail in landing neatly on his feet, turning to face his brother with a broad grin on his face.

“Hey, that’s cheati- you can’t just quit the competitio-!”

“Hey, ‘Samu,” his brother interrupts, brandishing something brown and small from his pocket before sending it flying in Osamu’s general direction just as he peers at him, sending the missile to slam into his cheek. 

Atsumu Miya has a wicked aim.

“Chestnut.” Is the only sort of explanation that Osamu receives. A belated call of warning.

“Oi, ‘Tsumu, that hur- _ ow!” _ he exclaims, the full brunt of the force lapsing in its impact.

“Shut up.” 

Sauntering over to a park bench before collapsing onto it, lazing over it as though he owns it, Atsumu finally catches a moment to find his breath. Staring up at the stars that are just beginning to cross the skyline, he exhales a shaky breath. Puffy clouds disintegrate into the cool night’s sky, and he shivers at the sudden chill that has crept into the air.

“Oi, ‘Samu.”

“If you’re gonna throw another chestnut at me then-”

“No, no. I- that wasn’t why I brought you here,” he begins, and it’s as though there’s still leaves in his mouth and he’s biting around them, trying to figure out what to say and how to say them.

“Well? Was it to throw leaves at me instead?” Osamu cowers jokingly as he says it, and in the faint light that trickles down from the moon, Atsumu notes that there’ll be a somewhat yellow, insincere bruise resting where the chestnut hit his cheekbone tomorrow.

“Nah,” Atsumu smiles, and Osamu finally slides onto the bench beside him, hands in his pockets and slouching in on himself.

“Oi, mum said to stop slouching, remember? Or d’ya want to stay hunched like an old man when the wind changes?”

Osamu pulls a face, twisting as though he’s just swallowed a lemon, “Nah. I think it’s face expressions that stick when the wind changes?”

“Shut up, who cares, it’s all just semantics” Atsumu frowns, and cuts through any sort of conversation they were having previously.

And silence falls. Encompassing and chilly and consuming. The sort that causes one to seek comfort from the insides of their jacket, Osamu snuggling his lower half of his face into his jacket with mild boredom as he examines his shoes with half a mind to get up and leave. Half a mind to stay and listen to whatever his brother has to say. But silence prevails for a while longer, as the sun goes down and the night is cool on his cheeks; an unnecessary chill against the forming bruise on his cheek.

It is Atsumu who brings the silence to a halt, jerking from his seat and turning to his brother, “The reason I wanted you here is. Uh. I dunno how to say it, really,” he mumbles, fumbling with the buttons on his jacket for a second before standing up straight.

“Tsum-”

But he’s silenced by a round of bullets. Harsh and merciless; ruthless and unforgiving in their pursuits to tear straight through him. Bouncing against his jacket for the most part, an unprecedented assault of chestnuts fly past him, crashing against his neck and face and skimming his hair, and Osamu has had  _ enough. _

“Oi! Tsumu!” he yells, but his brother has already taken off, speeding down the path leading out of the park.

Gathering up chestnuts and leaves and other useful ammo as he hurries to leave, he follows the trail of laughter that’ll surely guide him to his target.

It’s the sort of laughter that gets lost in the whirlwind breeze of late October. The sort of laughter that is much more suited to summers long ago.

**Author's Note:**

> Not the fondest of this tbh, i need to work on balancing dialogue with description i think. 
> 
> hope you enjoyed it somewhat though?^^ thank u for reading !! :D


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